While correcting a High Court's reduction of compensation for a five-year-old boy killed by a tanker while walking to school on a road with no footpath, the Supreme Court declared that the right to walk on a demarcated footpath is itself a fundamental right under Articles 19(1)(d) and 21, taking priority over motorised vehicle movement, and directed the case be reconstituted as a public interest matter to compel a statutory framework protecting that right.
"I did what any father does every morning — I got my five-year-old son ready and walked him to school. We were just walking, the two of us, on a road with no footpath because there was no footpath to walk on. A tanker came from behind and struck my son. He didn't survive. I filed a claim seeking compensation for the unimaginable loss of my child, and even that modest measure of accountability was reduced by the High Court, as if his life, and the absence of anywhere safe for us to walk, mattered less on appeal than it did before the trial court."
Moral Universe
The father frames the tragedy as a preventable failure of the most basic urban infrastructure — a safe place to walk — compounded by a legal system that seemed to shrink, rather than honor, the value of his son's life when the matter reached appeal.
Emotional Driver
Profound grief over the loss of a young child in an entirely preventable accident, compounded by the frustration of seeing compensation reduced rather than affirmed on appeal.
Objective
To obtain fair, undiminished compensation for his son's death and to see accountability for the absence of any safe walking infrastructure that contributed to the tragedy.
Blind Spots
The father's claim, filed years before this hearing, could not have anticipated that his individual compensation dispute would become the occasion for the Supreme Court to declare walking itself a fundamental constitutional right — the case's significance ultimately extended far beyond what any claimant could have sought or expected at the outset.
Inherent Tensions
- —A grieving family's narrow claim for fair compensation versus the Court's decision to use the case as a vehicle for a sweeping constitutional declaration about the right to walk
- —The everyday, seemingly mundane act of walking a child to school versus its sudden, irreversible transformation into a fatal hazard due to absent infrastructure
- —The Motor Vehicles Act's vehicle-centered compensation framework versus the Court's recognition that this framework was never designed to protect pedestrians in the first place